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It is indeed true that believing that people at the top levels of the administration deserve punishment-- and they absolutely do-- does not require anyone to feel sympathetically toward Charles Graner. But I do anyway.
It is no more permissible for America's prison system to torture him (and yes, he is being tortured) than it was for him to torture anyone else. Believing that he deserves to live a life of severe discomfort for several years (which I do) and believing that it's okay for the prison system to inflict that upon him (which I don't) are two very different things. What the prisoners at Guantanamo are going through in terms of torture is more severe, without question, but that doesn't mean that what Graner is going through is fine and dandy. "It could be worse" is never the way to set the bar for how to treat human beings. I don't care what they have done, no human being should have their own or anyone else's government devote time to trying to make them miserable, or making them miserable for no good reason. That is not the government's job.
I realize that schadenfreude is a very human emotion, and we will never be rid of it-- perhaps we shouldn't be. But that should only serve to increase our vigilance against allowing that emotion to dictate how we treat our prisoners.
